Written and Directed by

Sometimes the story behind a movie can bring an angle to what's
on the screen. Consider “Two Girls and a Guy,” written and directed by James
Toback, and starring Robert Downey Jr. The story involves a two-timing actor
who returns to his Manhattan apartment to be confronted by both of his
girlfriends, who've just found out about each other.

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Here's the background: * Toback and Downey worked together
before, in “The Pick-Up Artist” (1987), where Downey played a compulsive
womanizer who bounded through the streets of New York, fast-talking pretty
girls. He was a cad and a liar, but likable; Pauline Kael wrote that “Downey,
whose soul is floppy-eared, gives the movie a fairy-tale sunniness.” * James
Toback himself is, or was, a notorious pickup artist. How notorious? The late
Spy magazine once printed a double fold-out chart of his activity during just
one month. With the names of his female targets running down the left-hand side
of the page, the magazine used a grid to chronicle his various approaches, and
how many of his favorite pickup lines (“I work closely with Warren Beatty”) he
used on each woman.

* When Downey was shown on television, being led to jail in
handcuffs on drug charges, Toback was watching, and says he sat down
immediately to write a screenplay for his old friend. “When I saw him in that
orange jail jump suit, I knew he was ready to play this role,” Toback told me
at the 1997 Toronto film festival. Of course, perhaps Toback (whose screenplays
include “The Gambler” and “Bugsy”) was also ready to write it; the film is
confessional and contrite.

* “Two Girls and a Guy” was written in four days and filmed in
just 11, mostly inside a single apartment in SoHo. Not long after, Downey went
back to court and eventually to jail, only to be released this month.

Downey is not floppy-eared or sunny in this film as Blake, but
he is resilient and unbowed. Confronted with both of his girlfriends, Carla
(Heather Graham) and Lou (Natasha Gregson Wagner), he talks and thinks quickly,
saying he meant it when he told them both he had “never experienced real love”
before.

“He decided consciously to start with both of us at the same
time!” Lou says. And as they work it out, it appears he did meet them at about
the same time. He saw each girl three nights of the week, excusing himself on
the other nights because of the illness of his mother, who neither one ever
met.

The two women meet on his doorstep, break into his apartment and
are hiding there when he returns from a trip and leaves phone messages for them
both. When he sees them, he's at a loss for words, but soon they come tumbling
out; Toback in person is a torrential talker, and here Downey is as persuasive
as a snake oil salesman and Wagner (Natalie Wood's daughter) fires out
high-energy dialogue like Robin Williams.

What can be said, really? He's a cheating, lying SOB, and both
women find even more colorful terms to describe him, both as a person and in
terms of his various parts. The movie is essentially a filmed stage play, one
of those idea-plays like Shaw liked to write, in which men and women ponder
their differences and complexities. Is it true that men are polygamous by
nature? It's much more complex than that, the movie suggests, especially after
Lou suggests that her interest in Blake might expand to include Carla.

Downey, whatever his problems, is a fine actor, smart and in
command of his presence, and he's persuasive here as he defends himself: “I'm
an actor. And actors lie.” There is a show-stopping scene when he looks at
himself in a mirror and warns himself to get his act together. There are some
notes in the movie that I could have done without, including an offstage
gunshot and a tearjerker ending. But I enjoyed the ebb and flow of their time
together.

What shows Toback has learned something since his days as a Spy
cover boy is that the movie doesn't pretend any of these three people is really
in love. They're playing at being in love, but essentially all three are
soloists, looking out for themselves, and the women can sustain outrage only so
long before they begin to seek additional amusements and possibilities. As for
the man, well, he always told them his favorite song was “You Don't Know Me.”

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